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“This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

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Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#131

Post by moron4hire »

manojlds wrote: post #52
loupol wrote: post #48

Choosing installs to collect revenue on is stupid because it isn't tightly correlated to revenue for a game: Demos, bundles, free week-end tryouts on Steam, free-to-play games and other specific cases all lead to high install counts without necessarily generating the matching sales. It's especially stupid because Unity has good market share on mobile, which is a juicy market but with a fixed price per install, free-t…

Third outcome - Microsoft acquires them ( given the impact to Gamepass and C#)

Unity is so wholly siloed away from the rest of the .NET ecosystem that I doubt Microsoft really cares about Unity regarding its impact on C#.

Like, a lot of Unity developers think they know C#. They really don't. Most of the Unity developers I have met know a very, very small subset of C#, and almost nothing of .NET in general. That's not meant to be any shade-throwing at Unity developers. It's just that they are, for most purposes, completely different things. I can't take someone who has been working in Unity for the last 5 years and easily put them on any other kind of .NET project. The same for going the other way. The underlying language commonality is the least of the concerns.

A small part of this is how most of the .NET framework isn't exactly great to execute in the middle of a hot update loop, but a much larger part is because of how Unity is built, having reinvented their own wheels for many things that could have been contributions to the larger .NET/Mono/CLR/etc ecosystem.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#132

Post by moron4hire »

jalict wrote: post #93
glimshe wrote: post #66

The old story... Be friends to the community, get everybody to believe you then increase prices when everybody is locked in. This time we have an answer: Godot.

Missing ton of console exporting, Xbox Series, One, WinGDK, PS4, PS5, etc. And sure there might be some beta out there but we need proper support :)

This is FUD. If you get to the point of having a contract to deploy your game on a console, I expect you could afford to hire one of the several consulting companies that will help you port your Godot game to the console. And yes, they actually do exist.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#133

Post by salawat »

fragmede wrote: post #118
loupol wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does look like there is a lot of potential for abuse, depending on how installs are tracked. If it's some DRM system, pirated copies might or might not be counted, and of course "install bombs" would potentially be possible in theory. Which means a need to find ways to potentially exclude those installs from counting towards the count. This introduces crazy complexity when really you could have simple revenue shar…

I mean, there's going to be a web endpoint that gets hit to count one installation. That is definitely going to remain a secret, so no one could possibly run wget in a loop to say their steam account installed it a million times.

...How do you propose they'll hide the packet going over the network, that decodes to a GET or POST request?

I assure you. That endpoint will not remain secret no matter how hard they try.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#134

Post by nomercy400 »

How does this work retroactively on released products?

Say five years ago, I paid a company to build a house, who hired a contractor to build it and it was completed in a year. Nowadays, I open the door daily. Now the contractor goes to the company, saying that from January 1st, every time I open the door, the company has to pay a small fee to the contractor, because they built the house with the door five years ago.

How is that even legal, even in a B2B context? As a company, you have no control over the number of installations. How can they even measure the number of installations for games released 5-10 years ago?

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#135

Post by dgb23 »

The video game market is a feast or famine kind of deal. Few games break even, even fewer make a profit.

What Unity probably wants or needs is to take a cut off the large successes. That’s where all the money is.

The problem is that they aren’t involved in distribution.

This per/install model is trying to solve this by turning Unity into some kind of malware. A completely tone deaf move.

Why not build business relationships with the companies that have been successful with Unity? It’s in the interest of both sides that Unity and its ecosystem are stable, improving and growing.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#136

Post by glimshe »

moron4hire wrote: post #132
jalict wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing ton of console exporting, Xbox Series, One, WinGDK, PS4, PS5, etc. And sure there might be some beta out there but we need proper support :)

This is FUD. If you get to the point of having a contract to deploy your game on a console, I expect you could afford to hire one of the several consulting companies that will help you port your Godot game to the console. And yes, they actually do exist.

Not to mention that, by the time your game is ready, you should be able to leverage the new work the Godot team is doing for commercial console exporters.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#137

Post by nomercy400 »

Why did/can game companies not protect themselves against this possible change of contract?

I mean, if you spend millions on developing a game, taking two-three years to develop, surely you try to tackle any risks that might endanger the project. For example, by fixing the price on the foundation of your game, i.e. the game engine.

This is a huge change in the way this game engine will be considered for new games. If now during the development and full lifetime of the game the contract rules can change, gamedev companies will start to avoid these kind of contracts.

With this one change Unity made it so that they can now no longer be trusted to keep the agreed upon contract terms intact for the lifetime of the game.

If only they said this would go in effect for new, not-already-in-development-and-paid-for-game-engine, projects from January 1st, it would have saved them this breach-in-trust issue.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#138

Post by birracerveza »

labster wrote: post #85
birracerveza wrote: post #8

On 4chan it immediately sparked a crowdsourced effort to make scripts that repeatedly install/uninstall games in creative ways (VMs, MAC spoofing) with the specific intention to hurt developers. This is definitely one of the dumbest choices I've seen a company do. Props to Unity for speeding up their own death.

The best part is that we can use this against people whose politics we don’t agree with. Developer says something Trumpy? Let’s make him pay! Solo developer is a trans woman? Why not shoot for bankruptcy? I wonder if this could be used as a way to target civilians as part of a larger cyber war, like in the Ukraine conflict?

Exactly, it can, and will, be used as a weapon.

It is an actual liability to use Unity, and there is no way to avoid it. Anyone can directly hurt them by simply installing a game multiple times on multiple devices. Bonus, developers can hurt other competing developers!

It is such an idiotic move it is criminal, and I am hoping that they get slapped with a class action lawsuit if they don't recede on it.

The worst part is that, even though I'd love for everyone to just switch over to Godot, game studios cannot simply "change engine" and they absolutely know it. So for them to just come up with completely unreasonable terms, with no possibility to not agree to it? You are forced to accept to give them an arbitrary amount of money that is spat out at the end of the month by a proprietary, closed source system that is basically BUILT IN MALWARE IN EVERY SINGLE UNITY GAME.

That's actual fucking robbery.

They can't simply force users to accept to give them 110% of your revenue, or else, AND expose them to direct damage while doing so. This cannot be legal.

Absolutely shameful. I seriously hope that no one will ever consider Unity again after this stunt.

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#139

Post by thatwasunusual »

dgb23 wrote: post #135

The video game market is a feast or famine kind of deal. Few games break even, even fewer make a profit. What Unity probably wants or needs is to take a cut off the large successes. That’s where all the money is. The problem is that they aren’t involved in distribution. This per/install model is trying to solve this by turning Unity into some kind of malware. A completely tone deaf move. Why not build business relati…

> What Unity probably wants or needs is to take a cut off the large successes. That’s where all the money is. The problem is that they aren’t involved in distribution.

Isn't the simple solution to just tax the companies a percentage of the revenue? Isn't that what Unreal do?

Re: “This Is a Disaster:” Game Developers Scramble to Deal with Unity’s New Fees

#140

Post by nrabulinski »

salawat wrote: post #133
fragmede wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, there's going to be a web endpoint that gets hit to count one installation. That is definitely going to remain a secret, so no one could possibly run wget in a loop to say their steam account installed it a million times.

...How do you propose they'll hide the packet going over the network, that decodes to a GET or POST request? I assure you. That endpoint will not remain secret no matter how hard they try.

I’m pretty sure that was exactly the joke they were going for
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